January 08,
2013 "Information
Clearing House"
- Last November global governance expert
Professor Mary Kaldor gave a lecture at the Imperial
War Museum*, London. Her theme was Old and New
Wars – how the nature of warfare and the
organisation of its participants have changed. Old
wars, she said, were essentially a battle of wills
between two states or leaders. A war of two sides,
two armies, can be vicious as it progresses but
sooner or later one side wins, one loses, and some
kind of treaty is negotiated. In a literal sense
the war ends but, as any good historian knows, each
war has carried and planted the seeds of the
following war.

However,
armies facing armies no longer happens. There is a
halfway stage between old and new wars – such as
happened in Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan
– where an invading army finds itself at a loss as
to how to fight what is essentially a guerrilla war
fought by people trying to rid their country of a
force that has come in from outside and is trying to
impose its own solution on their state’s
difficulties. But when, politicians having realised
they are never going to ‘win’ this war, the invading
troops are pulled out, the fighting goes on. It
morphs into a ‘new’ war. Afghanistan does not have
a good outlook, and Iraq is still at war with
itself, where no such divisions existed before the
invasion. Nor does the imported heavy battlefield
equipment do that well against insurgents with
roadside bombs or hand-held rocket launchers – which
must be a sore disappointment to those who love big
machines.

There is no
clear way to end new wars, something which we should
take account of. They are far more complicated in
the make-up of combatants, but all are
seeking some form of power. And money (or more
accurately, profit) plays a large part. Nor is it
easy to tell who is raising money to fund the war,
or who is fighting the war to raise money to further
their aims. There are too many actors – soldiers in
uniform, freedom fighters, religious fighters,
Mujahideen, war lords, mercenaries and. of course,
men who simply love killing and migrate from country
to country, conflict to conflict. They went to Iraq
and now they are part of the Syrian Free Army.
Foreign passports proliferate in modern conflicts.
So – too many competing interests, with scant
attention paid to those who are truly ‘on the
ground’, the little people living in little
villages, growing little amounts of food for their
little families and sadly fertilising their fields
with their blood.

How many of
these combatants have a natural right to be there,
in that country or that province? How many are
interfering in someone else’s conflict? How many
are making the situation worse while justifying
their actions by claiming they are there to sort
things out? How many are fighting for power and
control over their countrymen? How many are
fighting because they have a particular vision of
their country and are trying to force that vision on
others? For each and every one of these fighters
one has to ask: what is that one trying to gain? It
is a far cry from the old wars with kings or
politicians deciding to go to war to protect their
‘interests’ and sending off hapless soldiers to do
the killing and dying. Or is it? Is the difference
between the old wars and the new simply that the old
wars were mostly fought by national armies, not
coalitions of convenience like ISAF and not splinter
groups representing different interests? The desire
for power, control and profit never alters.

All soldiers,
across all time can, and often do, act in an
inhumane way, committing appalling acts of cruelty.
One only has to read some of the evidence given at
the Baha
Mousa Inquiry to understand that war insists
that other people are ‘the enemy’ and that soldiers
feel, as they did in Iraq, that they have the right
to torture and beat those whose only crime is to
live in the invaded country. But now soldiers are
taking that one step further, too far, treading
beyond the line. The tools and training of modern
warfare are dehumanising them. Take drones.

It is hard to
believe that the first armed drones were used in
Afghanistan in 2001. In less than ten years they
have become an essential part of fighting war. They
are controlled from half a world away by people who
have never been to the country they are targeting;
who have no knowledge of the way of life, the
culture of the little blobs of humanity they track
in their monitors; who have no understanding of the
political and corporate background to the ‘war’ they
are fighting; and, most importantly, by people who
are in no danger of having their own blood spilt.
The deaths they cause are meaningless to the hand
that presses the button. They have meaning enough
for the people on the ground, gathering what they
can of shattered bodies for burial, and
unsurprisingly their use creates more so-called
terrorists.

Killing at a
distance dehumanises those doing it – it is not
killing but a computer game. Scoring a ‘hit’ that
involves no blood, no entrails, no broken lives
brings no guilt, no remorse and no proper awareness
of the hurt inflicted on others. But with the
physical damage being inflicted on Western forces
(in the
US Army alone 73,674 soldiers have been
diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and
30,480 soldiers have returned from combat with
traumatic brain injury), this, in itself, is a good
enough reason to use nothing but drones, and if both
sides use them then the only casualties will be
absolutely guaranteed to be civilian. It is bad
enough that the US thinks it is fighting a global
war on terror, so all the world is a battlefield.
What price the world if another state takes that
attitude thinking, quite rightly, that the US drones
are a form of terrorism?

Using drones
also dehumanises the people they kill. These are
not fellow humans but terrorists, not civilians but
collateral damage, not 8-year-old boys or old men of
eighty but potential combatants. The enemy becomes
nothing more than a fly to be swatted, a worm to be
stepped on. President Obama has to personally
authorise US drone strikes, more than 300 of them in
his first four years of office. That many of the
deaths were of children cannot be disputed,
regardless of the fact that the US insists that only
‘combatants’ are killed. But at the beginning of
December last year a senior US army officer speaking
to the Marine Corp Times said that troops in
Afghanistan were on the lookout for “children
with potential hostile intent” – in other words,
children could be deliberately targeted. Yet a few
days later, there was Obama weeping on camera over
the shocking deaths of the Connecticut school
children. Afghan children obviously don’t rate
tears.

Having gone
past the old form of war of charging into battle
against another army, it is inevitable that soldiers
should be expected and trained, when fighting
‘terrorists’ – aka: freedom fighters, resistance
fighters, insurgents, supporters of ‘regimes’,
religious fundamentalists (non-Christian, of course)
– to operate in the same way as drones, with
targeted assassinations, raids on homes or farmers
out in fields. We are told – and oh, am I tired of
this being parroted by politicians justifying
murderous actions by their forces – that the
terrorists are ‘hiding’ in civilian areas, using
women and children, even their own families as human
shields. If they are not regular soldiers but
people resisting occupying forces, they are not
using their families as human shields; the houses
are their homes, where they live, where they and
their families belong. They are all civilians.
And in much of the Middle East the prevailing
culture is that most men, particularly in rural
areas, own guns. Before the West visited so much
war upon them, the guns appeared mostly to be used
for firing shots into the air at weddings and other
celebrations. But they own guns therefore they must
be terrorists. By that logic, many US citizens are
also terrorists.

And now we
have the possibility of
super-soldiers, the ultimate killing machines.
Not satisfied with the vulnerability of soldiers to
fatigue, stress, madness, drug addiction and worse,
a sudden sense of morality, the Pentagon and others
are researching ways of bypassing all that
humanity. According to bioethicist Professor
Moreno, the military co-option of neuroscience is
now the fastest growing area of science. Millions
of dollars are being spent in researching the
soldier’s brain, testing drugs that will wipe out
unpleasant memories of dark deeds done, quell the
fatigue, mask pain and eliminate feelings of guilt.
It is not so much using robots (which in one sense
is what drones are) as turning humans into unfeeling
robots.

But if armies
become mere operators of drones, or the ‘super
soldier’, guilt-free and heartless, becomes reality,
then there really is no end to war. For the
publics’ reaction to damaged soldiers coming back
home and being a drain on families’ emotions and the
public purse because of PTSD or multiple
disablements will be the only thing that just might
finally persuade the politicians that war is not
worth the fighting.

* This was the
annual Remembrance Day Lecture for the Movement for
the Abolition of War (MAW)

Lesley Docksey
is the editor of Abolish War, the newsletter of the
Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW).
abolishwar.org.uk

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